Publishing Titan Who Redefined the New York Times

By

Stephen Miller and

Russell Adams

Updated Oct. 1, 2012 5:36 p.m. ET

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died Saturday at age 86, was perhaps the pre-eminent American publisher of his era. He diversified and solidified the New York Times' business while cementing the paper's reputation for top-flight journalism with coups like the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War.

ENLARGE

Former New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, seen in 1973.
Associated Press

During Mr. Sulzberger's three decades of leadership, the so-called Gray Lady of journalism was transformed into something akin to today's newspaper, with separate sections devoted to areas like lifestyle and sports. By the time he retired in 1992, circulation was approaching new highs while revenue burgeoned as the paper increased its national reach.

In a statement Saturday, Mr. Sulzberger's son, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., said: "It is with deep sadness that I inform you that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, my father, passed away. Punch, as everyone knew him, brilliantly led the New York Times Company for over three decades—as chairman and CEO of the Times Company and as publisher of The New York Times. ... Punch will be sorely missed by his family and his many friends, but we can take some comfort in the fact that his legacy and his abiding belief in the value of quality news and information will always be with us."

When Mr. Sulzberger was named publisher in 1963, it was far from obvious that he would succeed; his own father, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had been reluctant to see his son inherit his job.

The family's ties to the New York Times date back to 1896 when Mr. Sulzberger's grandfather, Adolph Simon Ochs, acquired control of the failing, 9,000-circulation paper for $75,000. Mr. Ochs died in 1935, passing the publisher job to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who served in that capacity until 1961.

After the elder Sulzberger's first choice for publisher, Orvil Dryfoos, died unexpectedly in 1963, Mr. Sulzberger was given the job despite being age 37 and relatively untested.

"He wasn't ready for it," Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of the Times and one of Mr. Sulzberger's close friends, said in an interview in 2010. "No one quite knew what his function was. But they didn't realize how smart he was. His instincts were absolutely flawless."

"Punch" Sulzberger—so nicknamed because of his older sister Judy—was raised in a capacious Upper-East-Side townhouse a stone's throw from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Educated at private schools, he was an indifferent student and joined the Marines at age 17 to fight in World War II.

"The Marines woke me up," he once told his mother.

Mr. Sulzberger started work as an obituary writer in 1951 for the Milwaukee Journal, but his professional debut was less than promising. He had a stint at the Times' Paris bureau, where his news sense seemed typified by an incident when he attended an auto race at Le Mans in 1955. A race car plowed into the crowd, killing the driver and more than 80 spectators, but Mr. Sulzberger didn't think to call the Paris bureau with a report.

Returning to New York, Mr. Sulzberger took an ill-defined executive job at the paper. "Vice-president in charge of nothing," was how he described his role to New York magazine in 1991. Yet when the paper's new publisher, Mr. Dryfoos, Punch Sulzberger's older cousin, died of a heart attack in 1963, the family turned to Mr. Sulzberger. It was, his mother later wrote in her memoir, "something of a gamble."

The paper Mr. Sulzberger inherited was growing but financially crippled, still reeling from a citywide worker strike that had closed all papers. He moved aggressively to make the Times a financially independent enterprise capable of standing up to the unions. Early in Mr. Sulzberger's tenure, the company diversified into television and magazines and later broke the Times out of its two-section mold, expanding it to a four-part paper covering more advertising-friendly topics like home products and sports.

Such efforts were possible because of another of Mr. Sulzberger's key moves: taking the Times public. In 1969, the Times began trading on the American Stock Exchange after it created a dual-class stock structure that gave common shareholders limited voting rights while preserving the Sulzberger family's control through a separate class of nontraded shares. The setup was designed to shield the newspaper from outside influence and keep the company in the Sulzberger family's hands well into the 21st century.

Such decisive moves were hardly what Times observers had expected. Mr. Sulzberger had a previously undetected tough streak.

"There are a lot of men walking around this town without their heads today because they thought all Punch Sulzberger was was a pleasant young man," a veteran Times journalist told New York magazine in 1974.

Mr. Sulzberger's defining move was his decision in 1971 to publish a series of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. He pushed for publication against the advice of his outside counsel, who warned him the fallout could land him in jail or, worse, imperil the Times.

"I didn't think they were going to come and lock me up, but I thought they could fine us one hell of a lot, and we didn't have all that much money," Mr. Sulzberger said in "The Trust," a 1999 history of the New York Times by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones.

Media attorney Floyd Abrams, whom the Times brought in after its longtime counsel refused to represent the paper, said in an interview in 2010 that the decision was far from clear-cut at the time. As a former Marine, Mr. Sulzberger took seriously the government's contention that publication could breach national security.

Recalling a meeting at which Mr. Sulzberger elected to fight a court order that the Times cease publishing the papers, Mr. Abrams says, "What I remember best about the meeting was the coolness of Mr. Sulzberger at a time of great heat in the country."

Self-effacing and formal with employees, Mr. Sulzberger seemed most comfortable in the Times newsroom, friends and former colleagues say. Mr. Gelb recalled that Punch regularly would wander into the daily news meeting with an attaché case and tell Abe Rosenthal, executive editor in the 1970s and 1980s, he had "some important business to discuss." Afterward, the two men and Mr. Gelb would duck into Mr. Rosenthal's office where Punch would sit down, open his case and pull out a good bottle of wine. "We'd drink wine and talk about the news," Mr. Gelb said.

The environment outside those doors was far less collegial, however, owing largely to Mr. Sulzberger's decision to install Mr. Rosenthal instead of Max Frankel as executive editor. Mr. Rosenthal, who took the post in 1977, was an intimidating presence whose imperious style wore out the staff even as it elevated its performance, according to several accounts. Mr. Sulzberger in 1986 replaced Mr. Rosenthal with his chief rival, Mr. Frankel, who was directed to prepare Mr. Sulzberger's son to be the next publisher and "make the newsroom a happy place again," according to Mr. Frankel's memoir, "The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times."

In 1992, Mr. Sulzberger passed the torch to his son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. In his farewell memo to staff Mr. Sulzberger, now publisher emeritus, made an unusually informal nod: "See you in the cafeteria."

Corrections & Amplifications An earlier version of this article misspelled Orvil Dryfoos's surname as Dreyfoos. An earlier version also incorrectly stated that the Milwaukee Journal had been owned by the New York Times in 1951; it has never been owned by the New York Times.

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